It's not just discussions about programming languages. All kinds of HN posts about security vulnerabilities commonly get sidetracked by very predictable "if only it would be written in Rust" threads.

I guess I don't understand how that qualifies as "sidetracking." If the vulnerability in question is a spatial or temporal memory safety bug, it seems very reasonable and pertinent to observe that Rust would have prevented it.

Unless it's the volume or consistency of that reply that you're objecting to?

Yeah but does it make sense to suggest to rewrite software that are years old, have collected solutions for years and know how? Maybe rust devs could end wishing that things were written in rust and start writing things in rust

> Maybe rust devs could end wishing that things were written in rust and start writing things in rust

They are, though. Like, I don't even disagree with the cost of rewriting, but there are very much active efforts to rewrite things in rust (ex. coreutils - https://github.com/uutils/coreutils , OS - https://www.redox-os.org/ ) or to add rust to existing projects (Linux, Firefox and Chrome both (https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/...)).

This is just completely moving the goal posts. This thread was talking about observing that a particular vulnerability would be prevented in Rust. But now you've taken it from that, to, "why not rewrite the project in Rust."

They are not the same thing.

> start writing things in rust

Yeah because nobody is writing anything in Rust. What a bunch of blowhards!

Then people complain that projects advertise themselves as being written in Rust.